Merrill Lynch & Co., Wall Street's biggest money manager, with $478 billion of assets, is charging clients lower prices than No. 2 Morgan Stanley and posting higher returns as investments chief Robert Doll tries to transform mutual funds into the company's fastest-growing business, Bloomberg News reported Monday.
Money management was New York-based Merrill's only major unit to report higher earnings and revenue in the third quarter - by contrast with sales and trading, retail brokerage, and investment banking.
Its improved performance was not enough to prevent the withdrawal of $854 million from Merrill's U.S. stock and bond funds in the first nine months of 2004; investors preferred independent and better performing managers like Fidelity and Vanguard, according to Financial Research Corp., an industry consulting firm in Boston.
Fidelity has attracted $21 billion this year, and Vanguard, the industry's second-biggest company, has taken in $47 billion, Financial Research said.
